August 7, 2025 • 63 mins
SEASON 4 EPISODE 2: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: The United States of America does not have a functioning government.
The Trump Dictatorship and the Library of Congress – Congress which Mike Johnson runs via a porn app – DELETED part of the official online edition of the Constitution – the part that limits the suspension of Habeas Corpus and bans presidents accepting foreign bribes. The Library says it was a coding error and would be fixed soon…ish. Yeah, the coding in Trump’s DNA.
The White House had to DENY that the White House Chief of Staff was to meet last night with the Vice President, the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, and the FBI Director to discuss what to DO about the Trump/Epstein cover-up scandal, and what to do WITH the RECORDING of the Deputy Attorney General’s two days’ of bargaining with a convicted pedophile and child sex trafficker… and nobody seemed to notice that the headline was that WHATEVER the Chief of Staff, A-G, Deputy A-G, and FBI Director WERE meeting with the Vice President ABOUT… the PRESIDENT WASN’T GOING TO BE THERE.
There is no competent executive authority, no congressional or senate oversight, no reliable judiciary. The United States of America does NOT NOW have a functioning government. The nominal president has spent the last few days making up economic statistics and poll numbers and threatening his predecessors with prosecution for imaginary crimes punishable by death while wandering around the roof of the White House, and phoning in to a business network with racist moronity the content of which is just this side of a 19th century minstrel show, or continuing to get more and more in bed, figuratively, with a convicted pedophile and child sex trafficker, in a scheme to cover-up her crimes, her late partner crimes, and whatever the president’s role was or was not… in them. And the first and seventh people in the line of presidential succession were going to have dinner with their Epstein expert who just met with Gulaine Maxwell and the head of the FBI and the woman who RUNS the White House but NOT the president and you know it almost doesn’t MATTER if they were meeting to try to figure out what to do about Trumpsteen or not.
By 3:14 PM Eastern the Library of Congress said Sections 8, 9 and 10 of the 1st Article were back online so, shrug emoji, I guess there are limits on emoluments and suspending Habeas Corpus… for now. Fifteen minutes later, however, there were still huge swaths of all three sections missing from the official online version of the Constitution. But coding. And so what, it’s just the ONLINE version, what’s the difference? Trump just fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because she wouldn’t delete the official online jobs numbers and will soon find someone to post fabricated numbers online which will then be accepted as real – and official – because they’re ONLINE.
There is no functioning government, just a mediocre Public Relations firm. Understaffed. Trying to sell Edsels, Google Glasses, New Coke, and fascism.
B-Block (40:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Acting NASA "Director" Duffy wants to put nukes on the moon, even though that was the plot of the re-make of the movie "The Time Machine" in which nukes on the moon destroyed the moon and rendered earth uninhabitable good call reality TV boy. The New York Times won't stop trying to make Harvard-Fetch happen. And the Trump Council on Lack of Fitness, the one Super Bowl star Saquon Barkley turned down membership on? The Council announced he accepted.
C-Block (55:00) THURSDAYS WITH THURBER: Of all his great stories, the one that might have been the most likely to have been written in order to be performed aloud, I humbly offer you this week: "The Night The Bed Fell."
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. At
this exact hour, the United States of America does not
(00:27):
have a functioning government. The Trump dictatorship and the Library
of Congress Congress, which Mike Johnson runs via a porn
app deleted part of the Constitution yesterday. I'll just say
that again. Deleted part of the Constitution yesterday. Deleted that
(00:48):
part of the Constitution that limits the suspension of habeas
corpus and bans presidents from accepting foreign bribes. The Library
says this was a coding error and it would be
fixed soon. Is coding error, Yeah, the coding in Trump's DNA.
(01:11):
The White House had to deny that the White House
Chief of Staff was to meet last night with the
Vice President, the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, and
the FBI Director to discuss what to do about the
trump Stein disaster, the Trump Epstein cover up scandal, and
also what to do with the recording of the Deputy
Attorney General's two days worth of bargaining with a convicted
(01:34):
pedophile and child sex trafficker. And nobody seemed to notice
that the real headline in that was whatever the Chief
of Staff ag deputy agn FBI director. We're meeting with
the Vice president about the president was not going to
be there. There is right now, no confident executive authority,
(01:59):
no congressional or Senate oversight, no reliable judiciary. The United
States of America does not now have a functioning government.
The nominal president, a lunatic, has spent the last few
days making up economic statistics and poll numbers and threatening
his predecessors with prosecution for imaginary crimes punishable by death,
(02:22):
while he, the nominal President, wanders around the roof of
the White House and phones into a business TV network
spewing racist moronity, the content of which is just this
side of a nineteenth century minstrel show. Or while he
continues to get more and more in bed figuratively with
(02:43):
a convicted pedophile and child sex trafficker in a scheme
to cover up her crimes, her late partners crimes, and
whatever the President's role was or was not in those crimes,
and the first and seventh people in the line of
presidential succession, we're going to have dinner with their Epstein
expert who just met with Gallaine Maxwell, and they were
(03:07):
going to dine with the head of the FBI and
the woman who actually runs the White House, but not
the president. And you know, it almost doesn't matter if
they were meeting to try to figure out what to
do about trump'steen or not. What are they meeting for
with the vice president but not the president? The United
(03:27):
States of America does not now have a functioning government.
By three fourteen pm Eastern daylight time, the Library of
Congress said sections eight, nine, and ten of the First
Article of the Constitution were back online. So shrug, emoji,
(03:48):
I guess there are limits on emoluments and on suspending
habeas corpus for now. Fifteen minutes later, however, there were
still huge swaths of all three of those sections of
the first Article that were missing from the official online
version of the Constitution, but just coding. So what, it's
(04:10):
just the online version not the real one. What's the difference. Well,
Trump just fired the head of the Bureau of Labor
Statistics because she would not delete the official online jobs numbers,
and he will soon find somebody to post fabricated numbers online,
which will then be accepted as real and official and
online because they're online. There is no functioning government, just
(04:38):
a mediocre public relations firm, an understaffed, mediocre public relations
firm which is trying to sell the governmental equivalent of
ed souls and Google glasses and new coke and fascism. Happily,
(05:00):
that firm, the new NGO USA pr inc Is still
insistent on keeping Trumpstein in the news. Thank goodness, they
can get that right. Release the tapes or the transcripts
of Todd Blanche talking to Maxwell for two days, in
which she says, oh, no, Trump was uninvolved, don't believe
(05:22):
those pictures, and after which she was then coincidentally, maybe accidentally,
moved from her jail cell in Debs behind Bars, Florida
to Club fed in Texas. You're gonna release those tapes
and then try to explain why she was moved and
(05:43):
create yet another Trumpstein scandal. What number seventy three? And
this decision to release or not release was made only
after they met with everybody except Trump, after Trump brought
Trumpstein up again at an event about the old Olympics.
(06:06):
Were you aware of and did you personally approve the
prison transfer for Gallaine Maxwell that your Justice department.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
I didn't know about it at all.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
No, I read about it.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Just like you did.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
And do you believe that she is not.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
A very uncommon thing.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Do you believe that she's credible to be listening to
your deputy Attorney General sat down with her recently.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Well, he's let me tell you, he's a very talented man.
His name is Todd Blanche. He's a very legitimate person,
very high I just have very highly thought of person,
respected by everybody. And I didn't talk to him about it,
but I will tell you that whatever he asks would
be totally appropriate, and it's not an uncommon thing to
(06:44):
do that. And I think he probably wants to make
sure that you know people that should not be involved
or aren't involved, or not hurt by something that would
be very very unfortunate, very unfair to a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
For her part, Maxwell does not want that interview released
or the Epstein files and lists released. And Trump has
sent Congress and somebody has to be the four hundred
and thirty first best Congressman James Comer to demand depositions
about Epstein from Democrats because somebody in a dictatorship has
(07:18):
to do the dumbest jobs, and that somebody is Jamie
Comer demanded depositions from everybody except Trump and accept the
ex Attorney General Bill Barr, And it was the Congressman
Steve Cohen who again asked what did Barr do with
the Epstein videos and films and images confiscated after the
(07:42):
FBI under Barr's administration, rated Epstein's townhouse in New York
Low these many years ago, and the political commentator Charlemagne
the God pointed out that when he criticized Trump on
Fox about trump Stein, he never mentioned race once, but
then Trump called him a racist. Charlemagne added this quote
(08:05):
shows how authoritarians will attempt to bully people into pushing
false narratives and added quote, I need you that is
Trump to keep the promises of a great economy and
the promises of transparency with the Epstein files. And if
your head is spinning, because once again there is so
(08:27):
much Trumpstein news, what do you mean there was a
Trumpstein dinner with the Vice president, the chief of staff
attorney generally FBI chief and without Trump Huh, what what
do you mean? You couldn't even make up a good
cover story for why you'd do that. If your head
is spinning because of that, remember it doesn't matter. The
(08:49):
point was summarized in the movie The Manchurian candidate. The
point is Trumpstein lives, Trumpstein expands, Trumpstein abides. Are they
saying are there any Communists in the Defense Department? Of
course not. They're saying how many communists are there in
(09:11):
the defense department? Trump Stein? Now, trump Stein? Tomah, you've
already heard me say. You know the rest quote of
(09:49):
the week about Trump, a clear winner, the utterly unself
aware and utterly unintentionally hilarious nutjob. Charlie Kirk Quoting Charlie Kirk,
There's a lot you can call Donald Trump. No one
has ever called him feminine. I paused there, because you
(10:13):
wouldn't have heard anything I said while you were laughing.
Trump is a giant middle finger to all the screeching
hall monitors that attacked young men for just existing. He's
a giant fu to the feminist establishment. I'm sorry, no
one has ever called Trump feminine. Donald Trump, for thirty years,
(10:36):
at least every day, slathers on enough makeup every day,
not for being on TV, but just for being out
among people. Slathers on enough makeup every day to completely
(11:01):
cover all of the New Year York Radio City Rockets
and their backup team and at the age of seventy nine.
He dyes his hair and eyebrows yellow. That is as
(11:22):
goddamned feminine as it gets. My mother never did any
of that. My grandmother, who died wearing makeup, never did
any of that, never called him feminine. Holy cow, he's
(11:47):
wearing bronzer. That's the quote of the week about Trump.
And as always, we have a dozen quotes of the
week by Trump. The most meaningful one if you continue
to harbor the belief that the third term, or as
we call it, the dictatorship talk, is just trolling. Trump
went on CNBC and between his other lies, said of
(12:07):
an illegal, unconstitutional civil war starting third term quote, I'd
like to run. I have the best poll numbers I've
ever had. You know why, because people love the tariffs.
Even the CNBC people had to correct him on all
of that, all of which is wrong. The Daily Beast
corrected him quote. Trump's comments come as the real clear
(12:29):
Politics polling Aggregator shows Trump's approval rating is five points underwater,
with just forty six percent of Americans approving. It should
be noted that five points underwater is the best Trump polling.
Forty six percent approval is the best Trump number because
Real Clear Politics is a bullshit fascist site that cooks
(12:52):
the polling books, uses discredited polls, sometimes uses brand new
ones to try to make things look better than they
are for Trump. Elliott Morris's Strength in Numbers has Trump's
approval not at forty six percent, but at thirty seven percent.
Gallup has just measured Trump among independents approval twenty nine percent.
(13:19):
More independents like the makeup job he does on himself
than his policies. Hell, that's Susie Wilds's dinner might have
been about how to get him out of the White House.
One thing they might explore as an alternative is seeing
if he could become a farm worker. The reports are
beginning to trickle in about crops rotting in the fields.
(13:41):
Now it is cherries in Oregon. Half the workers from
one of the big cherry farms gone gone. Three hundred
thousand dollars worth of cherries gone. That's just this spring
and summers cherries. Never mind all the cherries yet to
(14:03):
be gone. It is so bad that even Trump has
noted and responded and seem to be laying the ground
work for backing off the deportation of farm workers. He
did it in the most possibly racist way. I mean,
listen to this. What he says here, he could be
(14:24):
quoting from an episode of Amos and Andy.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
We're taking care of our farmers. We can't let our
farmers not have anybody. You know, these are very these people.
You can't replace them very easily. You know, people that
live in the inner city are not doing that work.
They're just not doing that work. And they've tried. We've tried,
everybody tried. They don't do it. These people do it naturally, naturally.
(14:51):
I said, what happens if they get it to a
farmer the other day? What happens if they get a
bad back? He said, they don't get a bad back, sir,
because if they get a bad back, they die. I said,
That's interesting, isn't it. You know, these are very you know,
in many ways, very very special people.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
If this sounds like something you read back in high school,
that's because it's just what every slave owner said as
a rationalization of slavery in eighteen fifty nine. They're good
at it. Oh and by the way, with all of this,
we have not even gotten yet to Trump wandering around
(15:33):
on the White House roof. We haven't gotten to it. Yet,
why are you on the roof, mister president?
Speaker 3 (15:53):
Why are you doing up there?
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Let's come down and talk to us. You know, why
do you feel? They started? On internet? Wag put it
the premiere of Fat on a Hot Tin roof. You
may have seen Trump on the roof of the White
House the other day, the video of it at least,
and wondered if you were awake, or what had happened
(16:22):
now to this timeline, or who had screwed up the universe,
or what could possibly be next. I saw that, and
I said, I've seen this before. I have seen Trump
do this before. I have been there in person as
Trump has done this before, not the roof part. If
(16:43):
it had been the roof part, I had have been
playing the patrician Neil role from the great movie A
Face in the Crowd, which I will circle back to later,
which concerns the subject of guys on roofs. But I've
seen that look of him wandering around leading a bunch
of people who are pretending that he's not doing something
(17:06):
really crazy, stupid or wasting time. And I have been
there within feet of him as he has done it,
the look in his eye of I know what all
of this is I'm a builder. I could have been
a architect when he's lucky, if he can successfully construct
(17:28):
a good lie the what's all of this over here?
Is this? Are these storm drains or vents or shrubbery?
Is that a martian or a tree? He doesn't know
what he's doing. He's not a builder, he's not an architect.
He's not a designer. He just has money and pays
(17:49):
other people to do it and slaps his name on it.
This is his life. It's not even his money, it's
just his name. In fact, it's not even his name,
it's his father's name. The story that what I saw
was about the elevator and the gym at two hundred
East sixty ninth Street, what was formerly until they all
(18:12):
got their money together and took his name off of it.
Trump Palace a somewhat exaggerated name for a halfway decent
apartment building on the Upper East Side of New York
in which I lived from the year two thousand and
seven to the year twenty sixteen, until I couldn't stand
it anymore and sold my apartment at a loss, which
was the last apartment sold in that building for several years.
(18:36):
Because I recognized, in the one time I've ever been
smart about real estate that whether he won or lost
the twenty sixteen election, his name as a conveyance for
real estate was dead, as it now is, certainly in
New York. So I sold and got out. But a
few years previously, he had written me a fan letter.
(18:57):
I've discussed this before. It was about a commentary I
did on ESPN two about Ted Turner, and he wrote
me a fan letter, and obviously I couldn't stop him.
He had my address. I had met him previously at NBC.
I had met him in the nineteen eighties. It feels
like the eighteen eighties. It was a long time ago,
and I knew him, and it was like, oh, no,
here he is again. I decided to take advantage of
(19:19):
the fan letter, which is how I wound up seeing
the look on his face as he wandered around the
roof aimlessly and mindlessly, while projecting, at least in his
own mind, a sense of being the great constructor. Well,
the con part is correct. What I wrote him back
to take advantage of this fandom was to try to
(19:41):
approach him on the subject of the deteriorating condition of
the building in which I lived. He didn't own it.
It was called Trump Palace, but it was just managed
by his company. The building had its own separate ownership,
and obviously the apartments were owned by US suckers who'd
bought there. And I thought, if I could play on this,
(20:02):
I could get him to do something about what was happening,
which was number one. The elevators had basically stopped working,
and a lot of members of the staff had worked
very hard to hold them together. But it was time
to do something about the elevators and various other sundry
problems in the infrastructure of this building. So I wrote
a letter, and I must say I got a call
(20:23):
almost immediately from one of his staffers, who later explained
that that's the way they treated people. While they were
treating people with celebrity kind of names, this way, they
didn't treat the average person who lived in a Trump building.
They just were afraid I'd go public or they could
claim credit for my success because I lived in their building.
You'll remember the story about Derek Jeter of the New
(20:44):
York Yankees breaking his ankle and Trump announcing that he
had broken his ankle because he'd sold his apartment in
another Trump building, because that's the way Trump thinks, or
doesn't think, as the case may be. So now let
me take you back to this time when I saw
him with the same look on his face and the
same meandering. I'm just supervising this because I have to
(21:04):
make the final decision. I'll make the decision about where
the giant electric Trump sign with the picture of me
goes on the roof of the White House. Where that
look comes from, and what it indicates about him, and
also how it, for a moment made me think that
we were finally approaching the only possible literary ending to
the Trump presidency. And it evoked again the movie A
(21:28):
Face in the Crowd and Patrician Neil and Andy Griffith.
But I'm diverging past the point of you understanding what
I'm saying anymore, So I'll get back to this. I
write him about the elevators. They call me and they
say he's going to come in and inspect the elevators
on such and such a day and see what the
problem really is. And my argument was, it's your name
on the building. When my name is on something, I
(21:50):
take personal responsibility for it. I'm only doing TV shows. Here,
you do a TV show and you have buildings, you
can materially do something much more easily about the buildings
than I can about my TV shows. I'm sure you've
found the same thing. And sure enough he showed up
right at the hour that was announced that I was
fairly impressed by that, and in he walked. And by
the way, for those of you scoring at home, he's about,
(22:13):
at least he was in twenty thirteen about my height,
and I'm about six three and a half, so that
part may not be an exaggeration, although he did look
heavier than I did it those days, and I was
pretty heavy. I was probably about two sixty five. Then anyway,
he walks in, he comes over, shakes my hand, and
in person he can be exactly the charmer that the
(22:36):
people who believe he's not insane think he is. And
you sit there going, wait a minute, this doesn't line
up with the other guy. And my initial thought in
twenty thirteen was there's a real problem here, because there
are at least two different Donald Trump personalities, and that's
always a bad sign. It doesn't really matter which one
is the right one, the good one, or the evil one.
(22:57):
That they're both there. That's a bad sign. My first
objection to him running for president was I didn't think
we should have a president with a totally split personality.
Then we found out what the split personality was a
cover for the real horrible personality. Okay, So he's in
there and he's inspecting the elevators, and he's inspecting the
(23:17):
other problems, and he's quizzing me about the things I
wrote in the letter, and he says, we're going to
get right on it. Thanks, but I enjoy the show.
You're doing. Great work, great work, great work. Keep up
the good work and call me anytime. My numbers on
the letter called me. And off he goes. And a
week later there's a big announcement inside Trump Palace. They
(23:38):
are going to remodel the gym. What about the elevators,
the other problems with the electrical elements, the failing heating
and air conditioning ducts, and the internal structure that now
creates a slamming noise on six or seven of the floors,
and the other things that were no the gym. And
(24:01):
it was explained to me by the manager of the
building was a very nice guy named Bill. Bill explained
to me that the problem with doing what I did
was you simply send him into your building and he
starts looking at it, and he doesn't remember what you
said was the problem. He just sees what he sees,
and he sees something that he didn't think looked gold enough.
(24:27):
The gym, which was on the ground floor and actually
had windows onto the street, was one of the first
things you would see if you got a tour of
Trump Palace. It was over to the left of the
main stand, the main business desk, the concierge area, the lobby,
and then the gym, and you could see the gym,
(24:48):
and you could see it from the street. And he
didn't like any of the equipment in the gym, so
he tore out the entire gym. Obviously, he didn't pay
for that. We the people who owned the apartments, paid
for that. And it was tens or twenties or thirties
of thousands of dollars, and we all got charged for it.
And the new equipment none of it worked, and the
matting didn't fit, and all of the good machines were
(25:10):
taken out in bad machines. Gold machines were put in
in its place. And I learned a great lesson there,
which was, yes, he's just as crazy now as he
was when you met him in nineteen eighty three. So
that look on his face, that look on his face
is I'm in my element. I am the master of building.
I'm better than my father was at this I can
(25:31):
build anything. We could rebuild the entire White House. We
could make it two hundred and seventy four stories tall.
When somebody shouted, he are you're thinking of putting on
an addition, a second floor, I thought, oh God, don't
suggest that to him. The thing will be two hundred
and seventy six stories tall before the end of the month.
Whatever it is that he plans to do is not
what the White House needs, and not structurally what it
(25:52):
can support, and nothing that will help anybody but him.
Just count on that. However, as I said in a
more metaphorical and symbolic way, I saw two other things.
The first I saw the famous Andy Griffith film A
Face in the Crowd. If you have never seen A
Face in the Crowd, stop playing this podcast right now
(26:14):
and go and find it, stream it, buy it, borrow
it from somebody, steal it out of a library somewhere,
and watch a Face in the Crowd in which Andy
Griffith portrays a populist, a bum, a criminal who rises
literally from the floor of a jail. I believe in Arkansas,
and through various circumstances, one of which is, he gets
(26:36):
his own populist television show, becomes the advisor to presidents,
and is on the verge of running for president himself.
And I won't spoil it any further except to say
that the character that Andy Griffith plays, Lonesome Roads, is
so evil that Andy Griffith, in interviews that he did
after this film was completed in nineteen fifty seven and
(26:58):
It's Ilia Kazan, after this film was completed, Andy Griffith
said he would never do any part like that again.
And the reason that he only played lovable sheriffs from Bumpkinville, Carolina,
or lovable elderly lawyers who are far smarter than they
seem from Bumpkinville, Illinois. The reason he only played sweet, old,
(27:22):
nice guys and good pillars of the community was that
the role of Lonesome Roads the populace, brought out evil
in his own personality that he never wanted to experience again.
Andy Griffith could have been one of the great horrible
actors of all time, one of the great evil characters.
If in another world he says, no, I think this
(27:43):
is my calling. He could have been Darth Vader, only
they wouldn't have put a helmet on it, because the
look in his eyes when he was being evil in
that film is extraordinary. I know what he saw. He
could see it on the screen, and if it was
in you, you would never want it to come out again,
unless you were Donald Trump. So at the end of it,
(28:04):
he is at the top of his tower and he
has given away and I will not spoil it any
further if you've not seen the film. He's given away
his popularity with one act and they've all left him.
And he's up there. And the woman who put him
there was named Marcia, and she's portrayed by Patricia Neil,
the great actress, and she's standing at the bottom of
(28:27):
this giant home of his, this duplex. I believe somewhere
on the Central Park area of New York, one of
the sides of Central Park's never made clear, could be
Central Park South, Central Park West Fifth Avenue, and he's
standing on the balcony and he's going, I'll jump, I'll jump,
and she stops and looks at him, and Patricia Neil,
(28:51):
who's always been a sweetheart in this film and has
put up with everything from this man, suddenly starts screaming, jump.
Do everybody a favor? Already a jump? So that's what
I thought of as well, in addition my own experience
watching him look around, asking what is this? Is it
power station? Is it a bridge? What is it I'm at?
(29:11):
Is it the White House? Is it the Blue House?
Should we add seventeen stories to it? Where is this?
Where are my wings? I also thought of a face
in the crowd. But lastly I thought of the book,
not the TV series, not the British TV series, not
the American TV series with Kevin Spacey, the Book House
(29:33):
of Cards. Four years literally since this began in twenty fifteen,
I have thought that there was only one known, already
printed literary conclusion to this entire nightmare of Donald Trump
as candidate for office, as commentator about public events, and
(29:54):
finally as President of the United States, and now as
repeat president of the United States and as potential dictator
of the United States, there was only one possible literary outcome,
and I would like to read it to you now.
It's a few paragraphs because if you've seen House of Cards,
first off, if you've seen the British edition, you love it.
(30:14):
If you've seen the American edition, you asked, why is
it four hundred and eighty seven episodes long? Why have
they slowed it down to the point where an hour
of the TV show only covers an hour of their lives.
They kind of stretched that thing out, patting it a
little bit. The British series is, I believe, complete with
(30:36):
six episodes, and it is masterfully done by Ian Richardson,
and as we used to say at ESPN, it moves
like a rocket. Not so the American edition. But the
key factor is in each of the ends of both
of these shows, the British and the American versions. In
the end of the first series, the lead character Prime
(30:57):
Minister Erkitt and in the American version, President Underwood their
own hands, kills a woman reporter. In the British case,
he throws her off the roof of the Houses of
Parliament after he confesses to her of his other crimes.
(31:18):
This is not how the book ends. The book ends.
It was written by Michael Dobbs, with no idea that
there would be sequels. In Britain, they made it into
three series, and as I mentioned, in this country, they
made it into seven thousand different episodes and they don't
play it anymore because the whole Kevin Spacey thing. However,
(31:41):
this is not what the book says. The book offers
a different kind of ending altogether, the same scenario in
which the woman reporter Mattie Storn, actually records his confession
and in the TV series he then throws her off
the roof, and the animating part of the next two
(32:02):
series is what happened to the taper that she made
of him confessing after she is dead in a car
parked next to Parliament. That's not how the book ends,
and I have thought, and I was reminded of this
because he's wandering around the roof of this and I'm
going to take the liberty of probably violating their copyright
(32:23):
and reading about four paragraphs so you know this, So
you know that this is what I thought at first
glance when I saw Trump on the roof of the
White House. You can't prove a thing. It's your word
against mine, he whispered. Mattie said, nothing at first, but
(32:44):
pressed the rewind button on her recorder. As the tapes
fun round, she looked down upon Erkutt, who was shivering violently.
Your final mistake, mister Urkutt. You thought I switched it off.
She punched yet another button. As she did so, the
clearly recorded words of their conversation filled the air, damning
him in every syllable, the proof which would condemn him.
(33:07):
As she walked slowly away, leaving him wretched in the snow,
the silence in his head was filled with the ghostly
mocking laughter of his father. The setting sun pierced through
the frosty sky. As it did so, it glanced off
the snow covered tower of Big Ben and cascaded into
a thousand tiny streams of light, blinding the American tourist
(33:29):
who was trying to capture the scene on video. He
was quite clear later in his description of what had happened.
The Parliament building had suddenly become like a great torch
set alight by the sun. It was really a beautiful sight,
as if the whole building were blaze. And then from
way up under Big Ben, something seemed to fall, as
(33:54):
if a moth had flown into the heart of an
immense candle, and its blackened and charred body was falling
all the way to the ground. Owned it's difficult to
believe it was a man, one of your politicians. What
did you say his name was? So the original end
(34:19):
of House of Cards, Prime Minister Urkett confesses to his
crimes while being secretly recorded, and instead of killing the reporter,
he throws himself off the roof. And I say that
because it might have been difficult to tell that that's
what's happening from my otherwise brilliant and compelling reading of
the original Michael Hobbs' novel. Because and you will reach
(34:42):
this conclusion quickly. The job that Hobbs and the other
producers and especially the actors like the late Ian Richardson
did in creating the BBC version of House of Cards
is spectacular. And the novel House of Cards, anyway, that's
how all this would end, were at a novel. Also
(35:07):
of interest here in novel is fiction, and so apparently
is the President's Council on Physical Fitness. Here's a shock.
Trump named a member of the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia
Iggles to it after said member had declined announced he
was on it, and then the guy says no, not,
I never agreed to it, adding to the fact that
(35:27):
everybody else, including two star TV sportscasters and two sports
league commissioners, did not decline the appointment. So they are
now members of a commission featuring a registered sex offender
who was arrested for statutory rape the President's Council on
total lack of fitness. What do Tony Romo, Wayne Gretzky,
(35:50):
Gary Bettman, and Roger Goodell do? Now that's next. This
is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Oberman still ahead
(36:24):
on this edition of Countdown almost Friday. Haven't done a
lot of Thurber lately. Let's go Thursdays with Thurber. A
box to hide in is great, Walter Middie. They have
made many movies about, even the catbird seat movies, but
(36:44):
for my money, his best, most action filled, most easily
visualized in your head story. The best story to read
aloud is The Night the Bed Fell. Next in Thursdays
with Thurber first, Believe it or not, There's still more
new idiots to talk about out the roundup of the
(37:05):
mis grants, morons and done in Kruger effects specimens who
constitute two days. Other horse persons in the world, the
brons worst Sean has this pronounced Doofy, Duffy duffy. Anyway,
(37:25):
he's the Secretary of Transportation and NASA because everybody has
to do two jobs now, because Trump's keeping all the
money for himself. This is also what happens when you
do not hire qualified people to run a government. You
cast them because in your sinility and dotage and madness,
you think they look good on TV and that all
(37:49):
the shit they're supposed to do takes care of itself.
This is Duffy who can't get the air traffic control
centers fully staffed, and we put him in charge of
a new project building nuclear reactors on the Moon. I'm
(38:10):
going to point out that to get nuclear material with
which to operate nuclear reactors to the Moon, you're going
to have to send nuclear material up in a rocket,
presumably an Elon Musk rocket, maybe a Jeff Bezos rocket
(38:31):
made out of cardboard. So the odds are high that
the rocket is going to blow up on or near
the launch pad. So you have now spread all the
nuclear material all over, say Texas or the whole hemisphere.
But first you've flown the nuclear material up. Great plan,
(38:56):
duff Man. But let's just say you don't blow it
up somehow, and you actually build a nuclear reactor on
the moon, because that way you can build a house
in which Captain Scarlet and the Thunderbirds and the other
Jerry Anderson marionettes can live in while they run you know,
(39:19):
space pew pew pew pew. Nuclear reactions to help fuel
homes on the moon. Why does this sound so familiar?
Oh right, this was the plot ad in the two
(39:39):
thousand and two remake of the movie The Time Machine.
We're in the year two thirty seven, just eleven twelve
years from now. They try nuclear reactions on the Moon
and destroy the Moon. They literally break it into little pieces,
and the debris comes out of the sky and hits
(39:59):
us and makes Earth uninhabitable for like seven hundred thousand years.
And worst of all, the only human left is the
actor Guy Pierce. Was this the plan? Great job? Secretary
of Reality TV, Sean Doofey, the runner up worser The
(40:21):
New York Times, the great journalist James Fallows keeps pointing
this out, and the Times keeps doubling down. Anyway, The
Harvard Crimson Campus newspaper, a real news organization still operating
in Boston, keeps reporting that the reports that the school
is negotiating a five hundred million dollar bribe of Trump,
(40:42):
like the one Columbia is doing, like the one Brown
is doing, that these reports are false. The Crimson quotes
Harvard President Alan Garber as insisting he is doing no
such thing and would do no such thing. Yet the
reports continue in The New York Times because somebody in
the Trump administration is using Times reporters as stenographers day
(41:07):
after bloody day. Are they negotiating? What is the right
way to negotiate? Why would Harvard pay five hundred million
when Brown is only paying fifty million? The Times, as
James Follows, notes, keeps doubling down without even noting the
denials from the president of Harvard, or the story in
(41:29):
the Harvard Crimson, or the next story in the Harvard Crimson.
We're the one after that, quoting The Times. By the
start of last week, Harbard University had signaled its readiness.
And that's got an underscore on it indicating it's a
link to something, and I'll explain that in a moment.
By the start of last week, Carbard University had signaled
its readiness to meet President Trump's demand that it's been
(41:51):
five hundred million dollars to settle its damaging months long
battle with the administration, restore its critically bribe Trump. That's
the translation. The Times is looking for a way to
say bribe Trump, but it's afraid to because The New
York Times has now made of cowards. Also, the link
had signaled its readiness. The New York Times link is
to another New York Times story. So in this New
(42:14):
York Times story, which is clearly wrong, they use as
supporting evidence another New York Times story that is also
clearly wrong. You know what this is called. This is
called not being a good newspaper anymore. The Times also
is not noting what Brian Boitler wrote about last week.
If you are a Columbia student or a Brown student,
(42:36):
or if they are right somehow, a Harvard student, and
it is your racial data and your admissions details that
would be turned over to Trump, you have a lawsuit
against your school. You might have a class action lawsuit. Hell,
if you're an alum who just saw the value of
his degree or herd degree plummet in your workplace because
(43:00):
your alma mater is collaborating with Nazis you I might
have a lawsuit. What if you're a donor, Hi Columbia,
I'd like my twelve million dollars back. Oh you put
it in a building. Tough shit, I want it back.
But the Times just keeps throwing this crap against the wall.
And sadly, with all of this repeated instances of throwing
(43:25):
crap against the wall that benefits Trump, and all of
the both scientist stories and all of the headlines that
have been put through the defactualization machine, and all of
the refusals to call Trump crazy, and all the refusals
to say he's lying when he's lying, we now have
to ask, is the Times actively positioning itself to be
(43:48):
a tool of the fascists? Is the Times officially now
collaborating with Trump? And if so, why are any of
us patronizing it or believing it? But the winners the worst?
Worse than that, everybody who is on and whoever is
(44:09):
running the new President's Council on Physical fitness. Note that's
physical fitness, not mental fitness, since we have a president
who is opposed to mental fitness. Also, it doesn't say
anything about ethical fitness. Because it's pretty clear whoever announced
this lies a lot and without skill. Who in the
(44:30):
Trump administration does that description fit. The council will include
Executive Director Catherine Grenido, Chair Bryson Deschambeau, Saquon Barkley, Gary Bettman,
Nick Bosa, Harrison Butker, also known in the NFL as
Harrison butt Kiss, Cody Campbell, Roger Goodell, Wayne Gretzky, Nelly Corda,
(44:50):
Paul Triple h Levesque, Jack Nicholas, Gary Player, Marianna Rivera,
Tony Romo, Annika Sorenstam, Toua, Taggia Valoyo, Lawrence Taylor, Matthew
Kati Chuck, and Marianna Rivera and Marianna Rivera. That's not me.
They listed him twice, and I know it's Tagoviloa. I
(45:15):
was just doing a Trump pronunciation of Tago Viloa. He
listed Marianna Rivera twice. There's Gary Player, Marianna Rivera, Tony Romo,
instance and Marianna Rivera. He's on it twice. Well, Marianna
Rivera has two faces, so maybe he should be listed twice.
Problem number one This was announced during a Philadelphia Eagles practice,
(45:38):
so afterwards the reporters asked Philadelphia Eagles running back Saquon
Barkley about it, and he said it was news to him.
He never accepted a position on this council quote. A
couple months ago. It was brought to my team about
the council, so I'm not really too familiar with it.
I felt like I'm going to be super busy, so
me and my family thought it would probably be a
best interest to not accept that. I was definitely a
(46:02):
little shocked when my name was mentioned. I'm assuming it's
something great, so I appreciate it, but I was a
little shocked when my name was mentioned and this guy
had gone to the White House to meet Trump and
said he respected the office at least, and Trump still
lied about him. Of course, the real problem with this
(46:22):
President's counsel is that the reputations of everybody else but
Saquon Barkley are now damaged, if not ruined. They are
now all sharing an official government commission position with a
registered sex offender, a man arrested for statutory rape, the
former New York Giant Lawrence Taylor, who's listed there between
(46:43):
the two. Marianna rivers what he's guilty of, what he
was arrested for this is by definition pedophilia, so ruined
the reputations, well, Bryson Deshambo doesn't have any reputation. He's
a piece of shit, but anakasaurns them. On a panel
with a registered sex offender. Mariano Rivera on a panel
(47:06):
with a registered sex twice on a panel with a
registered sex offender. Jack Nicklaus on a panel with a
registered sex offender, He's also a piece of shit. Matthew
Kachuk just this week named the cover player on EA
Sports video game EA Hockey the new face of Hockey
on a panel with a registered sex offender, and think
(47:28):
of the front facing people. Can CBS still put Tony
Romo on its football broadcast now that he's on a
panel with a registered sex offender? Can TNT put Wayne
Gretzky on TV now that he's on a panel with
a registered sex offender? And wait? The commissioner of the
National Football League, Roger Goodell, can he remain commissioner if
(47:49):
he's on a panel with a registered sex offender? Is
the league not through Goodell normalizing what Lawrence Taylor did?
And wait? The commissioner of the National Hockey League, Gary
Bettman can he remain commissioner of the National Hockey He's
on a panel where the registered sex offender. I mean,
Lawrence Taylor was already Roger Goodell's problem, and Roger Goodell
(48:11):
clearly doesn't care about anything. He's Roger Goodell. If I
were Roger Goodell, I would get a I don't know
a facelift, and I'd changed my name. Lawrence Taylor was
already the NFL's problem. Now he's Hockey's problem. Too. Nice work,
Gary Betman. You just destroyed hockey for the sake of
Lawrence Taylor and Donald Trump, the President's new Council on
(48:34):
Fitness and stuff. Remember ettd Everything Trump touches dies, and
the old Groucho Marx jokes certainly applies here to Gretzky
and Ribera and Betman and Goodell and the others. You
should never want to belong to any Trump club that
would have you as a member. Two days worst persons
(48:58):
in the world. As we said Thursdays with Thurber. Now,
(49:43):
since there's no Friday podcast and we have not done
any Thurber in a long time, and as I said
before the break, I think this is the best story
to read aloud that he ever wrote, and I will
point out, as I have made many times this analogy
in terms of humor. James Thurber was the twentieth centuries
show Hey Otani, Show Hey Otani from Baseball, who at
(50:05):
times has been Baseball's best pitcher and at times has
been Baseball's best hitter. Show Heyotani of the Los Angeles
Dodgers is almost necessarily the most valuable player every year
because he can do as well as anybody else, or
nearly two things, when most other players can only excel
(50:28):
at one thing. Such is the story of James Thurber.
James Thurber was a brilliant writer, and in his spare time,
he was an equally brilliant, almost avant garde artist in
the same body. His simple drawings to pick the most
complex of emotions and comedic situations. His dogs are immortal,
and then there were his captions. Well, I can't do
(50:51):
anything with his drawings in a podcast, so I'll just
read and I will read you now in this episode
what is probably his most famous story from my life
in hard times, the night the bed fell James Thurber.
I suppose that the high water mark of my youth
(51:12):
in Columbus, Ohio was the night the bed fell on
my father. It makes a better recitation unless, as some
friends of mine have said, one has heard it five
or six times, than it does a piece of writing,
For it is almost necessary to throw furniture around, shake doors,
and bark like a dog to lend the proper atmosphere
(51:32):
and verisimilitude to what is admittedly a somewhat incredible tale. Still,
it did take place. It happened then that my father
had decided to sleep in the attic one night, to
be away where he could think. My mother opposed the
notion strongly, because she said the old wooden bed up
(51:52):
there was unsafe. It was wobbly, and the heavy headboard
would crash down on father's head in case the bed
fell and kill him. There was no dissuading him, however,
and at a past ten he closed the attic door
behind him and went up the narrow, twisting stairs. We
later heard I'm in his creakings as he crawled into bed. Grandfather,
(52:14):
who usually slept in the attic bed when he was
with us, had disappeared some days before. On those occasions,
he was usually gone six or eight days and returned
growling and out of temper with the news that the
Federal Union was run by a passel of blockheads, and
that the Army of the Potomac didn't have any more
chance than a fiddler's bitch. We had visiting us at
(52:36):
the time, a nervous first cousin of mine named Briggs Beale,
who believed that he was likely to cease breathing when
he was asleep. It was his feeling that if he
were not awakened every hour during the night, he might
die of suffocation. He had been accustomed to setting an
alarm clock to ring at intervals until morning, but I
persuaded him to abandon this. He slept in my room,
(53:00):
and I told him that I was such a light
sleeper that if anybody quit breathing in this room with me,
I would wake instantly. He tested me the first night,
which I had suspected he would, by holding his breath
after my regular breathing, had convinced him I was asleep.
I was not asleep, however, and called to him. This
(53:20):
seemed to allay his fears a little, but he took
the precaution of putting a glass of spirits of camphor
on a little table at the head of his bed
in case I didn't arouse him until he was almost gone.
He said he would sniff the camphor. A powerful reviver,
Briggs was not the only member of his family who
(53:41):
had his crotchets. Old Aunt Melissa Belle, who could whistle
like a man with two fingers in her mouth, suffered
under the premonition that she was destined to die on
South High Street because she had been born on South
High Street and married on South High Street. Then there
was Aunt Sarah Schauf, who never went to bed at
night without the fear that a burglar was going to
(54:04):
get in and blow chloroform under her door through a tube.
To avert this calamity, for she was in greater dread
of anesthetics than of losing her household goods, she always
piled her money, silverware, and other valuables in a neat
stack just outside her bedroom, with a note reading, this
is all I have. Please take it and do not
(54:24):
use your chloroform, as this is all I have. Aunt
Gracie's Chauf also had a burglar phobia, but she met
it with more fortitude. She was confident that burglars had
been getting into her house every night for forty years.
The fact that she never missed anything was to her
no proof to the contrary. She always claimed that she
(54:45):
scared them off before they could take anything by throwing
shoes down the hallway. When she went to bed, she
piled where she could get at them handily, all the
shoes there were about her house. Five minutes after she
had turned off the light, she would sit up in
bed and say hark. Her husband, who had learned to
(55:06):
ignore the whole situation as long ago as nineteen o three,
would either be sound asleep or pretend to be sound asleep.
In either case, he would not respond to her tugging
and pulling, so that presently she would arise, tiptoe to
the door, open it slightly, and heave a shoe down
the hall in one direction, and its mate down the
(55:27):
hall in the other direction. Some nights she threw them all,
some nights only a couple of pear. But I am
straying from the remarkable incidents that took place during the
night that the bed fell on father. By midnight we
were all in bed. The layout of the rooms and
the disposition of their occupants is important to an understanding
(55:49):
of what later occurred In the front room. Upstairs, just
under father's attic bedroom, where my mother and my brother Hermann,
who sometimes sang in his sleep, usually marching through Georgia
or onward Christian soldiers. Beale and myself were in a
room adjoining this one. My brother Roy was in a
room across the hall from ours, and our bull terrier
(56:11):
Wrecks slept in the hall. My bed was an army cot,
one of those affairs which were made wide enough to
sleep on comfortably only by putting up flat with the
middle section the two sides, which ordinarily hang down like
the sideboards of a drop leaf table. When these sides
are up, it is perilous to roll too far toward
(56:32):
the edge, for then the cot is likely to tip
completely over, bringing the whole bed down on top of
one with a tremendous banging crash. This, in fact, is
precisely what happened about two o'clock in the morning. It
was my mother who, in recalling the scene later first
referred to it as the night the bed fell on
your father, always a deep sleeper and slow to arouse,
(56:58):
I had lied to Briggs. I was at first unconscious
of what had happened. When the ironcot rolled onto the
floor and toppled over on me. It left me still
warmly bundled up and unheard, for the bed rested above
me like a canopy. Hence, I did not wake up,
only reached the edge of consciousness and went back. The racket, however,
(57:19):
instantly awakened my mother in the next room, who came
to the immediate conclusion that her worst dread was realized.
The big wooden bed upstairs had fallen on father. She
therefore screamed, let's go to your poor father. It was
this shout, rather than the noise of my cot falling,
that awakened Herman in the same room with her, he
(57:40):
thought that mother had become, for no apparent reason, hysterical.
You're all right, mama, he shouted, trying to calm her.
They exchanged shout for shout for perhaps ten seconds. Let's
go to your poor father, and you're all right. That
woke up Briggs. By this time I was conscious of
(58:00):
what was going on in a vague way, but did
not yet realize that I was under my bed instead
of on it. Briggs, awakening in the midst of loud
shouts of fear and apprehension, came to the quick conclusion
that he was suffocating and that we were all trying
to bring him out. With a low moan, he grasped
(58:21):
the glass of camphor at the head of his bed,
and instead of sniffing it, he poured it over himself.
The room reeked of camphor. Uugh ah choked Briggs like
a drowning man, for he had almost succeeded in stopping
his breath under the deluge of pungent spirits. He leaped
out of bed and groped toward the open window, but
(58:43):
he came up against one that was closed. With his hand,
he beat out the glass, and I could hear it
crash and tinkle on the alleyway below. It was at
this juncture that I, in trying to get up, had
the uncanny sensation of feeling my bed above me foggy
with sleep. I now suspected, in my turn that the
(59:04):
whole up was being made in a frantic endeavor to
extricate me from what must be an unheard of and
perilous situation. Get me out of this, I bawled, Get
me out. I think I had the nightmarish belief that
I was entombed in a mine gas. Briggs floundering in
his camphor. By this time, my mother, still shouting, pursued
(59:26):
by Hermann, still shouting, was trying to open the door
to the attic in order to go up and get
my father's body out of the wreckage. The door was stuck, however,
and would not yield. Her frantic pulls on it only
added to the general banging and confusion. Roy and the
dog were now up, the one shouting questions, the other barking. Father,
(59:49):
farthest away and soundest sleeper of all, had by this
time been awakened by the battering on the attic door.
He decided that the house was on fire. Oh coming, okay,
he wailed, in a slow sleepy It took him many
minutes to regain full consciousness. My mother, still believing he
was caught under the bed, detected in his I'm coming,
(01:00:13):
the mournful resigned note of one who was preparing to
meet his maker. He's dying, she shouted, I'm all right.
Briggs yelled to reassure her. I'm all right. He still
believed that it was his own closeness to death that
was worrying mother. I found at last the light switch
in my room unlocked. The door, and Briggs and I
(01:00:33):
joined the others at the attic door. The dog, who
never did like Briggs, jumped for him, assuming that he
was the culprit in whatever was going on, and Roy
had to throw Rex and hold him. We could hear
Father crawling out of the bed upstairs. Roy pulled the
attic door open with a mighty jerk, and Father came
down the stairs, sleepy and irritable, but safe and sound.
(01:00:56):
My mother began to weep when she saw him. Rex
began to howl. What in the name of God is
going on here? Asked Father. The situation was finally put
together like a giant gigsaw puzzle. Father caught a cold
from prowling around in his bare feet, but there were
(01:01:18):
no other bad results. I'm glad, said mother, who always
looked on the bright side of things, that your grandfather
wasn't here. I've done all the damage I can do here.
(01:01:43):
Thank you for listening. Most of our Countdown music was arranged, produced,
and performed by Brian Ray and John Phillip Schanel, the
musical directors of Countdown. Produced by Tko Brothers. Mister Ray
on guitars, bass and drums. Mister Chanelle handled orchestration and keyboards.
Our satirical and fifty musical comments are by the best
baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The Olderman theme from
(01:02:06):
ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis, courtesy of ESPN, Inc.
Is our sports music. Other music arranged and performed by
the group No Horns Allowed. James Thurber's The Night the
Bed Fell was written by James Thurber. The copyright abides
and it is held by the Thurber Literary Trust. My
(01:02:27):
announcer today is my friend Tony Kornheiser, and everything else
was as always my fault. That's countdown for today, Day
two hundred of America held hostage again, just two hundred
and sixty three days until the scheduled end of Trump's
lame duck lame brained term, unless he is removed sooner
(01:02:47):
by MAGA and Jeffrey Epstein or the actuarial tables, or
wandering around the White House roof. No, don't go near
the edge. No no. The next scheduled countdown is Monday
till then. I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning, good after noon,
good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is
(01:03:27):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. At
this exact hour, the United States of America does not
(00:27):
have a functioning government. The Trump dictatorship and the Library
of Congress Congress, which Mike Johnson runs via a porn
app deleted part of the Constitution yesterday. I'll just say
that again. Deleted part of the Constitution yesterday. Deleted that
(00:48):
part of the Constitution that limits the suspension of habeas
corpus and bans presidents from accepting foreign bribes. The Library
says this was a coding error and it would be
fixed soon. Is coding error, Yeah, the coding in Trump's DNA.
(01:11):
The White House had to deny that the White House
Chief of Staff was to meet last night with the
Vice President, the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, and
the FBI Director to discuss what to do about the
trump Stein disaster, the Trump Epstein cover up scandal, and
also what to do with the recording of the Deputy
Attorney General's two days worth of bargaining with a convicted
(01:34):
pedophile and child sex trafficker. And nobody seemed to notice
that the real headline in that was whatever the Chief
of Staff ag deputy agn FBI director. We're meeting with
the Vice president about the president was not going to
be there. There is right now, no confident executive authority,
(01:59):
no congressional or Senate oversight, no reliable judiciary. The United
States of America does not now have a functioning government.
The nominal president, a lunatic, has spent the last few
days making up economic statistics and poll numbers and threatening
his predecessors with prosecution for imaginary crimes punishable by death,
(02:22):
while he, the nominal President, wanders around the roof of
the White House and phones into a business TV network
spewing racist moronity, the content of which is just this
side of a nineteenth century minstrel show. Or while he
continues to get more and more in bed figuratively with
(02:43):
a convicted pedophile and child sex trafficker in a scheme
to cover up her crimes, her late partners crimes, and
whatever the President's role was or was not in those crimes,
and the first and seventh people in the line of
presidential succession, we're going to have dinner with their Epstein
expert who just met with Gallaine Maxwell, and they were
(03:07):
going to dine with the head of the FBI and
the woman who actually runs the White House, but not
the president. And you know, it almost doesn't matter if
they were meeting to try to figure out what to
do about trump'steen or not. What are they meeting for
with the vice president but not the president? The United
(03:27):
States of America does not now have a functioning government.
By three fourteen pm Eastern daylight time, the Library of
Congress said sections eight, nine, and ten of the First
Article of the Constitution were back online. So shrug, emoji,
(03:48):
I guess there are limits on emoluments and on suspending
habeas corpus for now. Fifteen minutes later, however, there were
still huge swaths of all three of those sections of
the first Article that were missing from the official online
version of the Constitution, but just coding. So what, it's
(04:10):
just the online version not the real one. What's the difference. Well,
Trump just fired the head of the Bureau of Labor
Statistics because she would not delete the official online jobs numbers,
and he will soon find somebody to post fabricated numbers online,
which will then be accepted as real and official and
online because they're online. There is no functioning government, just
(04:38):
a mediocre public relations firm, an understaffed, mediocre public relations
firm which is trying to sell the governmental equivalent of
ed souls and Google glasses and new coke and fascism. Happily,
(05:00):
that firm, the new NGO USA pr inc Is still
insistent on keeping Trumpstein in the news. Thank goodness, they
can get that right. Release the tapes or the transcripts
of Todd Blanche talking to Maxwell for two days, in
which she says, oh, no, Trump was uninvolved, don't believe
(05:22):
those pictures, and after which she was then coincidentally, maybe accidentally,
moved from her jail cell in Debs behind Bars, Florida
to Club fed in Texas. You're gonna release those tapes
and then try to explain why she was moved and
(05:43):
create yet another Trumpstein scandal. What number seventy three? And
this decision to release or not release was made only
after they met with everybody except Trump, after Trump brought
Trumpstein up again at an event about the old Olympics.
(06:06):
Were you aware of and did you personally approve the
prison transfer for Gallaine Maxwell that your Justice department.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
I didn't know about it at all.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
No, I read about it.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Just like you did.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
And do you believe that she is not.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
A very uncommon thing.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Do you believe that she's credible to be listening to
your deputy Attorney General sat down with her recently.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Well, he's let me tell you, he's a very talented man.
His name is Todd Blanche. He's a very legitimate person,
very high I just have very highly thought of person,
respected by everybody. And I didn't talk to him about it,
but I will tell you that whatever he asks would
be totally appropriate, and it's not an uncommon thing to
(06:44):
do that. And I think he probably wants to make
sure that you know people that should not be involved
or aren't involved, or not hurt by something that would
be very very unfortunate, very unfair to a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
For her part, Maxwell does not want that interview released
or the Epstein files and lists released. And Trump has
sent Congress and somebody has to be the four hundred
and thirty first best Congressman James Comer to demand depositions
about Epstein from Democrats because somebody in a dictatorship has
(07:18):
to do the dumbest jobs, and that somebody is Jamie
Comer demanded depositions from everybody except Trump and accept the
ex Attorney General Bill Barr, And it was the Congressman
Steve Cohen who again asked what did Barr do with
the Epstein videos and films and images confiscated after the
(07:42):
FBI under Barr's administration, rated Epstein's townhouse in New York
Low these many years ago, and the political commentator Charlemagne
the God pointed out that when he criticized Trump on
Fox about trump Stein, he never mentioned race once, but
then Trump called him a racist. Charlemagne added this quote
(08:05):
shows how authoritarians will attempt to bully people into pushing
false narratives and added quote, I need you that is
Trump to keep the promises of a great economy and
the promises of transparency with the Epstein files. And if
your head is spinning, because once again there is so
(08:27):
much Trumpstein news, what do you mean there was a
Trumpstein dinner with the Vice president, the chief of staff
attorney generally FBI chief and without Trump Huh, what what
do you mean? You couldn't even make up a good
cover story for why you'd do that. If your head
is spinning because of that, remember it doesn't matter. The
(08:49):
point was summarized in the movie The Manchurian candidate. The
point is Trumpstein lives, Trumpstein expands, Trumpstein abides. Are they
saying are there any Communists in the Defense Department? Of
course not. They're saying how many communists are there in
(09:11):
the defense department? Trump Stein? Now, trump Stein? Tomah, you've
already heard me say. You know the rest quote of
(09:49):
the week about Trump, a clear winner, the utterly unself
aware and utterly unintentionally hilarious nutjob. Charlie Kirk Quoting Charlie Kirk,
There's a lot you can call Donald Trump. No one
has ever called him feminine. I paused there, because you
(10:13):
wouldn't have heard anything I said while you were laughing.
Trump is a giant middle finger to all the screeching
hall monitors that attacked young men for just existing. He's
a giant fu to the feminist establishment. I'm sorry, no
one has ever called Trump feminine. Donald Trump, for thirty years,
(10:36):
at least every day, slathers on enough makeup every day,
not for being on TV, but just for being out
among people. Slathers on enough makeup every day to completely
(11:01):
cover all of the New Year York Radio City Rockets
and their backup team and at the age of seventy nine.
He dyes his hair and eyebrows yellow. That is as
(11:22):
goddamned feminine as it gets. My mother never did any
of that. My grandmother, who died wearing makeup, never did
any of that, never called him feminine. Holy cow, he's
(11:47):
wearing bronzer. That's the quote of the week about Trump.
And as always, we have a dozen quotes of the
week by Trump. The most meaningful one if you continue
to harbor the belief that the third term, or as
we call it, the dictatorship talk, is just trolling. Trump
went on CNBC and between his other lies, said of
(12:07):
an illegal, unconstitutional civil war starting third term quote, I'd
like to run. I have the best poll numbers I've
ever had. You know why, because people love the tariffs.
Even the CNBC people had to correct him on all
of that, all of which is wrong. The Daily Beast
corrected him quote. Trump's comments come as the real clear
(12:29):
Politics polling Aggregator shows Trump's approval rating is five points underwater,
with just forty six percent of Americans approving. It should
be noted that five points underwater is the best Trump polling.
Forty six percent approval is the best Trump number because
Real Clear Politics is a bullshit fascist site that cooks
(12:52):
the polling books, uses discredited polls, sometimes uses brand new
ones to try to make things look better than they
are for Trump. Elliott Morris's Strength in Numbers has Trump's
approval not at forty six percent, but at thirty seven percent.
Gallup has just measured Trump among independents approval twenty nine percent.
(13:19):
More independents like the makeup job he does on himself
than his policies. Hell, that's Susie Wilds's dinner might have
been about how to get him out of the White House.
One thing they might explore as an alternative is seeing
if he could become a farm worker. The reports are
beginning to trickle in about crops rotting in the fields.
(13:41):
Now it is cherries in Oregon. Half the workers from
one of the big cherry farms gone gone. Three hundred
thousand dollars worth of cherries gone. That's just this spring
and summers cherries. Never mind all the cherries yet to
(14:03):
be gone. It is so bad that even Trump has
noted and responded and seem to be laying the ground
work for backing off the deportation of farm workers. He
did it in the most possibly racist way. I mean,
listen to this. What he says here, he could be
(14:24):
quoting from an episode of Amos and Andy.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
We're taking care of our farmers. We can't let our
farmers not have anybody. You know, these are very these people.
You can't replace them very easily. You know, people that
live in the inner city are not doing that work.
They're just not doing that work. And they've tried. We've tried,
everybody tried. They don't do it. These people do it naturally, naturally.
(14:51):
I said, what happens if they get it to a
farmer the other day? What happens if they get a
bad back? He said, they don't get a bad back, sir,
because if they get a bad back, they die. I said,
That's interesting, isn't it. You know, these are very you know,
in many ways, very very special people.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
If this sounds like something you read back in high school,
that's because it's just what every slave owner said as
a rationalization of slavery in eighteen fifty nine. They're good
at it. Oh and by the way, with all of this,
we have not even gotten yet to Trump wandering around
(15:33):
on the White House roof. We haven't gotten to it. Yet,
why are you on the roof, mister president?
Speaker 3 (15:53):
Why are you doing up there?
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Let's come down and talk to us. You know, why
do you feel? They started? On internet? Wag put it
the premiere of Fat on a Hot Tin roof. You
may have seen Trump on the roof of the White
House the other day, the video of it at least,
and wondered if you were awake, or what had happened
(16:22):
now to this timeline, or who had screwed up the universe,
or what could possibly be next. I saw that, and
I said, I've seen this before. I have seen Trump
do this before. I have been there in person as
Trump has done this before, not the roof part. If
(16:43):
it had been the roof part, I had have been
playing the patrician Neil role from the great movie A
Face in the Crowd, which I will circle back to later,
which concerns the subject of guys on roofs. But I've
seen that look of him wandering around leading a bunch
of people who are pretending that he's not doing something
(17:06):
really crazy, stupid or wasting time. And I have been
there within feet of him as he has done it,
the look in his eye of I know what all
of this is I'm a builder. I could have been
a architect when he's lucky, if he can successfully construct
(17:28):
a good lie the what's all of this over here?
Is this? Are these storm drains or vents or shrubbery?
Is that a martian or a tree? He doesn't know
what he's doing. He's not a builder, he's not an architect.
He's not a designer. He just has money and pays
(17:49):
other people to do it and slaps his name on it.
This is his life. It's not even his money, it's
just his name. In fact, it's not even his name,
it's his father's name. The story that what I saw
was about the elevator and the gym at two hundred
East sixty ninth Street, what was formerly until they all
(18:12):
got their money together and took his name off of it.
Trump Palace a somewhat exaggerated name for a halfway decent
apartment building on the Upper East Side of New York
in which I lived from the year two thousand and
seven to the year twenty sixteen, until I couldn't stand
it anymore and sold my apartment at a loss, which
was the last apartment sold in that building for several years.
(18:36):
Because I recognized, in the one time I've ever been
smart about real estate that whether he won or lost
the twenty sixteen election, his name as a conveyance for
real estate was dead, as it now is, certainly in
New York. So I sold and got out. But a
few years previously, he had written me a fan letter.
(18:57):
I've discussed this before. It was about a commentary I
did on ESPN two about Ted Turner, and he wrote
me a fan letter, and obviously I couldn't stop him.
He had my address. I had met him previously at NBC.
I had met him in the nineteen eighties. It feels
like the eighteen eighties. It was a long time ago,
and I knew him, and it was like, oh, no,
here he is again. I decided to take advantage of
(19:19):
the fan letter, which is how I wound up seeing
the look on his face as he wandered around the
roof aimlessly and mindlessly, while projecting, at least in his
own mind, a sense of being the great constructor. Well,
the con part is correct. What I wrote him back
to take advantage of this fandom was to try to
(19:41):
approach him on the subject of the deteriorating condition of
the building in which I lived. He didn't own it.
It was called Trump Palace, but it was just managed
by his company. The building had its own separate ownership,
and obviously the apartments were owned by US suckers who'd
bought there. And I thought, if I could play on this,
(20:02):
I could get him to do something about what was happening,
which was number one. The elevators had basically stopped working,
and a lot of members of the staff had worked
very hard to hold them together. But it was time
to do something about the elevators and various other sundry
problems in the infrastructure of this building. So I wrote
a letter, and I must say I got a call
(20:23):
almost immediately from one of his staffers, who later explained
that that's the way they treated people. While they were
treating people with celebrity kind of names, this way, they
didn't treat the average person who lived in a Trump building.
They just were afraid I'd go public or they could
claim credit for my success because I lived in their building.
You'll remember the story about Derek Jeter of the New
(20:44):
York Yankees breaking his ankle and Trump announcing that he
had broken his ankle because he'd sold his apartment in
another Trump building, because that's the way Trump thinks, or
doesn't think, as the case may be. So now let
me take you back to this time when I saw
him with the same look on his face and the
same meandering. I'm just supervising this because I have to
(21:04):
make the final decision. I'll make the decision about where
the giant electric Trump sign with the picture of me
goes on the roof of the White House. Where that
look comes from, and what it indicates about him, and
also how it, for a moment made me think that
we were finally approaching the only possible literary ending to
the Trump presidency. And it evoked again the movie A
(21:28):
Face in the Crowd and Patrician Neil and Andy Griffith.
But I'm diverging past the point of you understanding what
I'm saying anymore, So I'll get back to this. I
write him about the elevators. They call me and they
say he's going to come in and inspect the elevators
on such and such a day and see what the
problem really is. And my argument was, it's your name
on the building. When my name is on something, I
(21:50):
take personal responsibility for it. I'm only doing TV shows. Here,
you do a TV show and you have buildings, you
can materially do something much more easily about the buildings
than I can about my TV shows. I'm sure you've
found the same thing. And sure enough he showed up
right at the hour that was announced that I was
fairly impressed by that, and in he walked. And by
the way, for those of you scoring at home, he's about,
(22:13):
at least he was in twenty thirteen about my height,
and I'm about six three and a half, so that
part may not be an exaggeration, although he did look
heavier than I did it those days, and I was
pretty heavy. I was probably about two sixty five. Then anyway,
he walks in, he comes over, shakes my hand, and
in person he can be exactly the charmer that the
(22:36):
people who believe he's not insane think he is. And
you sit there going, wait a minute, this doesn't line
up with the other guy. And my initial thought in
twenty thirteen was there's a real problem here, because there
are at least two different Donald Trump personalities, and that's
always a bad sign. It doesn't really matter which one
is the right one, the good one, or the evil one.
(22:57):
That they're both there. That's a bad sign. My first
objection to him running for president was I didn't think
we should have a president with a totally split personality.
Then we found out what the split personality was a
cover for the real horrible personality. Okay, So he's in
there and he's inspecting the elevators, and he's inspecting the
(23:17):
other problems, and he's quizzing me about the things I
wrote in the letter, and he says, we're going to
get right on it. Thanks, but I enjoy the show.
You're doing. Great work, great work, great work. Keep up
the good work and call me anytime. My numbers on
the letter called me. And off he goes. And a
week later there's a big announcement inside Trump Palace. They
(23:38):
are going to remodel the gym. What about the elevators,
the other problems with the electrical elements, the failing heating
and air conditioning ducts, and the internal structure that now
creates a slamming noise on six or seven of the floors,
and the other things that were no the gym. And
(24:01):
it was explained to me by the manager of the
building was a very nice guy named Bill. Bill explained
to me that the problem with doing what I did
was you simply send him into your building and he
starts looking at it, and he doesn't remember what you
said was the problem. He just sees what he sees,
and he sees something that he didn't think looked gold enough.
(24:27):
The gym, which was on the ground floor and actually
had windows onto the street, was one of the first
things you would see if you got a tour of
Trump Palace. It was over to the left of the
main stand, the main business desk, the concierge area, the lobby,
and then the gym, and you could see the gym,
(24:48):
and you could see it from the street. And he
didn't like any of the equipment in the gym, so
he tore out the entire gym. Obviously, he didn't pay
for that. We the people who owned the apartments, paid
for that. And it was tens or twenties or thirties
of thousands of dollars, and we all got charged for it.
And the new equipment none of it worked, and the
matting didn't fit, and all of the good machines were
(25:10):
taken out in bad machines. Gold machines were put in
in its place. And I learned a great lesson there,
which was, yes, he's just as crazy now as he
was when you met him in nineteen eighty three. So
that look on his face, that look on his face
is I'm in my element. I am the master of building.
I'm better than my father was at this I can
(25:31):
build anything. We could rebuild the entire White House. We
could make it two hundred and seventy four stories tall.
When somebody shouted, he are you're thinking of putting on
an addition, a second floor, I thought, oh God, don't
suggest that to him. The thing will be two hundred
and seventy six stories tall before the end of the month.
Whatever it is that he plans to do is not
what the White House needs, and not structurally what it
(25:52):
can support, and nothing that will help anybody but him.
Just count on that. However, as I said in a
more metaphorical and symbolic way, I saw two other things.
The first I saw the famous Andy Griffith film A
Face in the Crowd. If you have never seen A
Face in the Crowd, stop playing this podcast right now
(26:14):
and go and find it, stream it, buy it, borrow
it from somebody, steal it out of a library somewhere,
and watch a Face in the Crowd in which Andy
Griffith portrays a populist, a bum, a criminal who rises
literally from the floor of a jail. I believe in Arkansas,
and through various circumstances, one of which is, he gets
(26:36):
his own populist television show, becomes the advisor to presidents,
and is on the verge of running for president himself.
And I won't spoil it any further except to say
that the character that Andy Griffith plays, Lonesome Roads, is
so evil that Andy Griffith, in interviews that he did
after this film was completed in nineteen fifty seven and
(26:58):
It's Ilia Kazan, after this film was completed, Andy Griffith
said he would never do any part like that again.
And the reason that he only played lovable sheriffs from Bumpkinville, Carolina,
or lovable elderly lawyers who are far smarter than they
seem from Bumpkinville, Illinois. The reason he only played sweet, old,
(27:22):
nice guys and good pillars of the community was that
the role of Lonesome Roads the populace, brought out evil
in his own personality that he never wanted to experience again.
Andy Griffith could have been one of the great horrible
actors of all time, one of the great evil characters.
If in another world he says, no, I think this
(27:43):
is my calling. He could have been Darth Vader, only
they wouldn't have put a helmet on it, because the
look in his eyes when he was being evil in
that film is extraordinary. I know what he saw. He
could see it on the screen, and if it was
in you, you would never want it to come out again,
unless you were Donald Trump. So at the end of it,
(28:04):
he is at the top of his tower and he
has given away and I will not spoil it any
further if you've not seen the film. He's given away
his popularity with one act and they've all left him.
And he's up there. And the woman who put him
there was named Marcia, and she's portrayed by Patricia Neil,
the great actress, and she's standing at the bottom of
(28:27):
this giant home of his, this duplex. I believe somewhere
on the Central Park area of New York, one of
the sides of Central Park's never made clear, could be
Central Park South, Central Park West Fifth Avenue, and he's
standing on the balcony and he's going, I'll jump, I'll jump,
and she stops and looks at him, and Patricia Neil,
(28:51):
who's always been a sweetheart in this film and has
put up with everything from this man, suddenly starts screaming, jump.
Do everybody a favor? Already a jump? So that's what
I thought of as well, in addition my own experience
watching him look around, asking what is this? Is it
power station? Is it a bridge? What is it I'm at?
(29:11):
Is it the White House? Is it the Blue House?
Should we add seventeen stories to it? Where is this?
Where are my wings? I also thought of a face
in the crowd. But lastly I thought of the book,
not the TV series, not the British TV series, not
the American TV series with Kevin Spacey, the Book House
(29:33):
of Cards. Four years literally since this began in twenty fifteen,
I have thought that there was only one known, already
printed literary conclusion to this entire nightmare of Donald Trump
as candidate for office, as commentator about public events, and
(29:54):
finally as President of the United States, and now as
repeat president of the United States and as potential dictator
of the United States, there was only one possible literary outcome,
and I would like to read it to you now.
It's a few paragraphs because if you've seen House of Cards,
first off, if you've seen the British edition, you love it.
(30:14):
If you've seen the American edition, you asked, why is
it four hundred and eighty seven episodes long? Why have
they slowed it down to the point where an hour
of the TV show only covers an hour of their lives.
They kind of stretched that thing out, patting it a
little bit. The British series is, I believe, complete with
(30:36):
six episodes, and it is masterfully done by Ian Richardson,
and as we used to say at ESPN, it moves
like a rocket. Not so the American edition. But the
key factor is in each of the ends of both
of these shows, the British and the American versions. In
the end of the first series, the lead character Prime
(30:57):
Minister Erkitt and in the American version, President Underwood their
own hands, kills a woman reporter. In the British case,
he throws her off the roof of the Houses of
Parliament after he confesses to her of his other crimes.
(31:18):
This is not how the book ends. The book ends.
It was written by Michael Dobbs, with no idea that
there would be sequels. In Britain, they made it into
three series, and as I mentioned, in this country, they
made it into seven thousand different episodes and they don't
play it anymore because the whole Kevin Spacey thing. However,
(31:41):
this is not what the book says. The book offers
a different kind of ending altogether, the same scenario in
which the woman reporter Mattie Storn, actually records his confession
and in the TV series he then throws her off
the roof, and the animating part of the next two
(32:02):
series is what happened to the taper that she made
of him confessing after she is dead in a car
parked next to Parliament. That's not how the book ends,
and I have thought, and I was reminded of this
because he's wandering around the roof of this and I'm
going to take the liberty of probably violating their copyright
(32:23):
and reading about four paragraphs so you know this, So
you know that this is what I thought at first
glance when I saw Trump on the roof of the
White House. You can't prove a thing. It's your word
against mine, he whispered. Mattie said, nothing at first, but
(32:44):
pressed the rewind button on her recorder. As the tapes
fun round, she looked down upon Erkutt, who was shivering violently.
Your final mistake, mister Urkutt. You thought I switched it off.
She punched yet another button. As she did so, the
clearly recorded words of their conversation filled the air, damning
him in every syllable, the proof which would condemn him.
(33:07):
As she walked slowly away, leaving him wretched in the snow,
the silence in his head was filled with the ghostly
mocking laughter of his father. The setting sun pierced through
the frosty sky. As it did so, it glanced off
the snow covered tower of Big Ben and cascaded into
a thousand tiny streams of light, blinding the American tourist
(33:29):
who was trying to capture the scene on video. He
was quite clear later in his description of what had happened.
The Parliament building had suddenly become like a great torch
set alight by the sun. It was really a beautiful sight,
as if the whole building were blaze. And then from
way up under Big Ben, something seemed to fall, as
(33:54):
if a moth had flown into the heart of an
immense candle, and its blackened and charred body was falling
all the way to the ground. Owned it's difficult to
believe it was a man, one of your politicians. What
did you say his name was? So the original end
(34:19):
of House of Cards, Prime Minister Urkett confesses to his
crimes while being secretly recorded, and instead of killing the reporter,
he throws himself off the roof. And I say that
because it might have been difficult to tell that that's
what's happening from my otherwise brilliant and compelling reading of
the original Michael Hobbs' novel. Because and you will reach
(34:42):
this conclusion quickly. The job that Hobbs and the other
producers and especially the actors like the late Ian Richardson
did in creating the BBC version of House of Cards
is spectacular. And the novel House of Cards, anyway, that's
how all this would end, were at a novel. Also
(35:07):
of interest here in novel is fiction, and so apparently
is the President's Council on Physical Fitness. Here's a shock.
Trump named a member of the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia
Iggles to it after said member had declined announced he
was on it, and then the guy says no, not,
I never agreed to it, adding to the fact that
(35:27):
everybody else, including two star TV sportscasters and two sports
league commissioners, did not decline the appointment. So they are
now members of a commission featuring a registered sex offender
who was arrested for statutory rape the President's Council on
total lack of fitness. What do Tony Romo, Wayne Gretzky,
(35:50):
Gary Bettman, and Roger Goodell do? Now that's next. This
is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Oberman still ahead
(36:24):
on this edition of Countdown almost Friday. Haven't done a
lot of Thurber lately. Let's go Thursdays with Thurber. A
box to hide in is great, Walter Middie. They have
made many movies about, even the catbird seat movies, but
(36:44):
for my money, his best, most action filled, most easily
visualized in your head story. The best story to read
aloud is The Night the Bed Fell. Next in Thursdays
with Thurber first, Believe it or not, There's still more
new idiots to talk about out the roundup of the
(37:05):
mis grants, morons and done in Kruger effects specimens who
constitute two days. Other horse persons in the world, the
brons worst Sean has this pronounced Doofy, Duffy duffy. Anyway,
(37:25):
he's the Secretary of Transportation and NASA because everybody has
to do two jobs now, because Trump's keeping all the
money for himself. This is also what happens when you
do not hire qualified people to run a government. You
cast them because in your sinility and dotage and madness,
you think they look good on TV and that all
(37:49):
the shit they're supposed to do takes care of itself.
This is Duffy who can't get the air traffic control
centers fully staffed, and we put him in charge of
a new project building nuclear reactors on the Moon. I'm
(38:10):
going to point out that to get nuclear material with
which to operate nuclear reactors to the Moon, you're going
to have to send nuclear material up in a rocket,
presumably an Elon Musk rocket, maybe a Jeff Bezos rocket
(38:31):
made out of cardboard. So the odds are high that
the rocket is going to blow up on or near
the launch pad. So you have now spread all the
nuclear material all over, say Texas or the whole hemisphere.
But first you've flown the nuclear material up. Great plan,
(38:56):
duff Man. But let's just say you don't blow it
up somehow, and you actually build a nuclear reactor on
the moon, because that way you can build a house
in which Captain Scarlet and the Thunderbirds and the other
Jerry Anderson marionettes can live in while they run you know,
(39:19):
space pew pew pew pew. Nuclear reactions to help fuel
homes on the moon. Why does this sound so familiar?
Oh right, this was the plot ad in the two
(39:39):
thousand and two remake of the movie The Time Machine.
We're in the year two thirty seven, just eleven twelve
years from now. They try nuclear reactions on the Moon
and destroy the Moon. They literally break it into little pieces,
and the debris comes out of the sky and hits
(39:59):
us and makes Earth uninhabitable for like seven hundred thousand years.
And worst of all, the only human left is the
actor Guy Pierce. Was this the plan? Great job? Secretary
of Reality TV, Sean Doofey, the runner up worser The
(40:21):
New York Times, the great journalist James Fallows keeps pointing
this out, and the Times keeps doubling down. Anyway, The
Harvard Crimson Campus newspaper, a real news organization still operating
in Boston, keeps reporting that the reports that the school
is negotiating a five hundred million dollar bribe of Trump,
(40:42):
like the one Columbia is doing, like the one Brown
is doing, that these reports are false. The Crimson quotes
Harvard President Alan Garber as insisting he is doing no
such thing and would do no such thing. Yet the
reports continue in The New York Times because somebody in
the Trump administration is using Times reporters as stenographers day
(41:07):
after bloody day. Are they negotiating? What is the right
way to negotiate? Why would Harvard pay five hundred million
when Brown is only paying fifty million? The Times, as
James Follows, notes, keeps doubling down without even noting the
denials from the president of Harvard, or the story in
(41:29):
the Harvard Crimson, or the next story in the Harvard Crimson.
We're the one after that, quoting The Times. By the
start of last week, Harbard University had signaled its readiness.
And that's got an underscore on it indicating it's a
link to something, and I'll explain that in a moment.
By the start of last week, Carbard University had signaled
its readiness to meet President Trump's demand that it's been
(41:51):
five hundred million dollars to settle its damaging months long
battle with the administration, restore its critically bribe Trump. That's
the translation. The Times is looking for a way to
say bribe Trump, but it's afraid to because The New
York Times has now made of cowards. Also, the link
had signaled its readiness. The New York Times link is
to another New York Times story. So in this New
(42:14):
York Times story, which is clearly wrong, they use as
supporting evidence another New York Times story that is also
clearly wrong. You know what this is called. This is
called not being a good newspaper anymore. The Times also
is not noting what Brian Boitler wrote about last week.
If you are a Columbia student or a Brown student,
(42:36):
or if they are right somehow, a Harvard student, and
it is your racial data and your admissions details that
would be turned over to Trump, you have a lawsuit
against your school. You might have a class action lawsuit. Hell,
if you're an alum who just saw the value of
his degree or herd degree plummet in your workplace because
(43:00):
your alma mater is collaborating with Nazis you I might
have a lawsuit. What if you're a donor, Hi Columbia,
I'd like my twelve million dollars back. Oh you put
it in a building. Tough shit, I want it back.
But the Times just keeps throwing this crap against the wall.
And sadly, with all of this repeated instances of throwing
(43:25):
crap against the wall that benefits Trump, and all of
the both scientist stories and all of the headlines that
have been put through the defactualization machine, and all of
the refusals to call Trump crazy, and all the refusals
to say he's lying when he's lying, we now have
to ask, is the Times actively positioning itself to be
(43:48):
a tool of the fascists? Is the Times officially now
collaborating with Trump? And if so, why are any of
us patronizing it or believing it? But the winners the worst?
Worse than that, everybody who is on and whoever is
(44:09):
running the new President's Council on Physical fitness. Note that's
physical fitness, not mental fitness, since we have a president
who is opposed to mental fitness. Also, it doesn't say
anything about ethical fitness. Because it's pretty clear whoever announced
this lies a lot and without skill. Who in the
(44:30):
Trump administration does that description fit. The council will include
Executive Director Catherine Grenido, Chair Bryson Deschambeau, Saquon Barkley, Gary Bettman,
Nick Bosa, Harrison Butker, also known in the NFL as
Harrison butt Kiss, Cody Campbell, Roger Goodell, Wayne Gretzky, Nelly Corda,
(44:50):
Paul Triple h Levesque, Jack Nicholas, Gary Player, Marianna Rivera,
Tony Romo, Annika Sorenstam, Toua, Taggia Valoyo, Lawrence Taylor, Matthew
Kati Chuck, and Marianna Rivera and Marianna Rivera. That's not me.
They listed him twice, and I know it's Tagoviloa. I
(45:15):
was just doing a Trump pronunciation of Tago Viloa. He
listed Marianna Rivera twice. There's Gary Player, Marianna Rivera, Tony Romo,
instance and Marianna Rivera. He's on it twice. Well, Marianna
Rivera has two faces, so maybe he should be listed twice.
Problem number one This was announced during a Philadelphia Eagles practice,
(45:38):
so afterwards the reporters asked Philadelphia Eagles running back Saquon
Barkley about it, and he said it was news to him.
He never accepted a position on this council quote. A
couple months ago. It was brought to my team about
the council, so I'm not really too familiar with it.
I felt like I'm going to be super busy, so
me and my family thought it would probably be a
best interest to not accept that. I was definitely a
(46:02):
little shocked when my name was mentioned. I'm assuming it's
something great, so I appreciate it, but I was a
little shocked when my name was mentioned and this guy
had gone to the White House to meet Trump and
said he respected the office at least, and Trump still
lied about him. Of course, the real problem with this
(46:22):
President's counsel is that the reputations of everybody else but
Saquon Barkley are now damaged, if not ruined. They are
now all sharing an official government commission position with a
registered sex offender, a man arrested for statutory rape, the
former New York Giant Lawrence Taylor, who's listed there between
(46:43):
the two. Marianna rivers what he's guilty of, what he
was arrested for this is by definition pedophilia, so ruined
the reputations, well, Bryson Deshambo doesn't have any reputation. He's
a piece of shit, but anakasaurns them. On a panel
with a registered sex offender. Mariano Rivera on a panel
(47:06):
with a registered sex twice on a panel with a
registered sex offender. Jack Nicklaus on a panel with a
registered sex offender, He's also a piece of shit. Matthew
Kachuk just this week named the cover player on EA
Sports video game EA Hockey the new face of Hockey
on a panel with a registered sex offender, and think
(47:28):
of the front facing people. Can CBS still put Tony
Romo on its football broadcast now that he's on a
panel with a registered sex offender? Can TNT put Wayne
Gretzky on TV now that he's on a panel with
a registered sex offender? And wait? The commissioner of the
National Football League, Roger Goodell, can he remain commissioner if
(47:49):
he's on a panel with a registered sex offender? Is
the league not through Goodell normalizing what Lawrence Taylor did?
And wait? The commissioner of the National Hockey League, Gary
Bettman can he remain commissioner of the National Hockey He's
on a panel where the registered sex offender. I mean,
Lawrence Taylor was already Roger Goodell's problem, and Roger Goodell
(48:11):
clearly doesn't care about anything. He's Roger Goodell. If I
were Roger Goodell, I would get a I don't know
a facelift, and I'd changed my name. Lawrence Taylor was
already the NFL's problem. Now he's Hockey's problem. Too. Nice work,
Gary Betman. You just destroyed hockey for the sake of
Lawrence Taylor and Donald Trump, the President's new Council on
(48:34):
Fitness and stuff. Remember ettd Everything Trump touches dies, and
the old Groucho Marx jokes certainly applies here to Gretzky
and Ribera and Betman and Goodell and the others. You
should never want to belong to any Trump club that
would have you as a member. Two days worst persons
(48:58):
in the world. As we said Thursdays with Thurber. Now,
(49:43):
since there's no Friday podcast and we have not done
any Thurber in a long time, and as I said
before the break, I think this is the best story
to read aloud that he ever wrote, and I will
point out, as I have made many times this analogy
in terms of humor. James Thurber was the twentieth centuries
show Hey Otani, Show Hey Otani from Baseball, who at
(50:05):
times has been Baseball's best pitcher and at times has
been Baseball's best hitter. Show Heyotani of the Los Angeles
Dodgers is almost necessarily the most valuable player every year
because he can do as well as anybody else, or
nearly two things, when most other players can only excel
(50:28):
at one thing. Such is the story of James Thurber.
James Thurber was a brilliant writer, and in his spare time,
he was an equally brilliant, almost avant garde artist in
the same body. His simple drawings to pick the most
complex of emotions and comedic situations. His dogs are immortal,
and then there were his captions. Well, I can't do
(50:51):
anything with his drawings in a podcast, so I'll just
read and I will read you now in this episode
what is probably his most famous story from my life
in hard times, the night the bed fell James Thurber.
I suppose that the high water mark of my youth
(51:12):
in Columbus, Ohio was the night the bed fell on
my father. It makes a better recitation unless, as some
friends of mine have said, one has heard it five
or six times, than it does a piece of writing,
For it is almost necessary to throw furniture around, shake doors,
and bark like a dog to lend the proper atmosphere
(51:32):
and verisimilitude to what is admittedly a somewhat incredible tale. Still,
it did take place. It happened then that my father
had decided to sleep in the attic one night, to
be away where he could think. My mother opposed the
notion strongly, because she said the old wooden bed up
(51:52):
there was unsafe. It was wobbly, and the heavy headboard
would crash down on father's head in case the bed
fell and kill him. There was no dissuading him, however,
and at a past ten he closed the attic door
behind him and went up the narrow, twisting stairs. We
later heard I'm in his creakings as he crawled into bed. Grandfather,
(52:14):
who usually slept in the attic bed when he was
with us, had disappeared some days before. On those occasions,
he was usually gone six or eight days and returned
growling and out of temper with the news that the
Federal Union was run by a passel of blockheads, and
that the Army of the Potomac didn't have any more
chance than a fiddler's bitch. We had visiting us at
(52:36):
the time, a nervous first cousin of mine named Briggs Beale,
who believed that he was likely to cease breathing when
he was asleep. It was his feeling that if he
were not awakened every hour during the night, he might
die of suffocation. He had been accustomed to setting an
alarm clock to ring at intervals until morning, but I
persuaded him to abandon this. He slept in my room,
(53:00):
and I told him that I was such a light
sleeper that if anybody quit breathing in this room with me,
I would wake instantly. He tested me the first night,
which I had suspected he would, by holding his breath
after my regular breathing, had convinced him I was asleep.
I was not asleep, however, and called to him. This
(53:20):
seemed to allay his fears a little, but he took
the precaution of putting a glass of spirits of camphor
on a little table at the head of his bed
in case I didn't arouse him until he was almost gone.
He said he would sniff the camphor. A powerful reviver,
Briggs was not the only member of his family who
(53:41):
had his crotchets. Old Aunt Melissa Belle, who could whistle
like a man with two fingers in her mouth, suffered
under the premonition that she was destined to die on
South High Street because she had been born on South
High Street and married on South High Street. Then there
was Aunt Sarah Schauf, who never went to bed at
night without the fear that a burglar was going to
(54:04):
get in and blow chloroform under her door through a tube.
To avert this calamity, for she was in greater dread
of anesthetics than of losing her household goods, she always
piled her money, silverware, and other valuables in a neat
stack just outside her bedroom, with a note reading, this
is all I have. Please take it and do not
(54:24):
use your chloroform, as this is all I have. Aunt
Gracie's Chauf also had a burglar phobia, but she met
it with more fortitude. She was confident that burglars had
been getting into her house every night for forty years.
The fact that she never missed anything was to her
no proof to the contrary. She always claimed that she
(54:45):
scared them off before they could take anything by throwing
shoes down the hallway. When she went to bed, she
piled where she could get at them handily, all the
shoes there were about her house. Five minutes after she
had turned off the light, she would sit up in
bed and say hark. Her husband, who had learned to
(55:06):
ignore the whole situation as long ago as nineteen o three,
would either be sound asleep or pretend to be sound asleep.
In either case, he would not respond to her tugging
and pulling, so that presently she would arise, tiptoe to
the door, open it slightly, and heave a shoe down
the hall in one direction, and its mate down the
(55:27):
hall in the other direction. Some nights she threw them all,
some nights only a couple of pear. But I am
straying from the remarkable incidents that took place during the
night that the bed fell on father. By midnight we
were all in bed. The layout of the rooms and
the disposition of their occupants is important to an understanding
(55:49):
of what later occurred In the front room. Upstairs, just
under father's attic bedroom, where my mother and my brother Hermann,
who sometimes sang in his sleep, usually marching through Georgia
or onward Christian soldiers. Beale and myself were in a
room adjoining this one. My brother Roy was in a
room across the hall from ours, and our bull terrier
(56:11):
Wrecks slept in the hall. My bed was an army cot,
one of those affairs which were made wide enough to
sleep on comfortably only by putting up flat with the
middle section the two sides, which ordinarily hang down like
the sideboards of a drop leaf table. When these sides
are up, it is perilous to roll too far toward
(56:32):
the edge, for then the cot is likely to tip
completely over, bringing the whole bed down on top of
one with a tremendous banging crash. This, in fact, is
precisely what happened about two o'clock in the morning. It
was my mother who, in recalling the scene later first
referred to it as the night the bed fell on
your father, always a deep sleeper and slow to arouse,
(56:58):
I had lied to Briggs. I was at first unconscious
of what had happened. When the ironcot rolled onto the
floor and toppled over on me. It left me still
warmly bundled up and unheard, for the bed rested above
me like a canopy. Hence, I did not wake up,
only reached the edge of consciousness and went back. The racket, however,
(57:19):
instantly awakened my mother in the next room, who came
to the immediate conclusion that her worst dread was realized.
The big wooden bed upstairs had fallen on father. She
therefore screamed, let's go to your poor father. It was
this shout, rather than the noise of my cot falling,
that awakened Herman in the same room with her, he
(57:40):
thought that mother had become, for no apparent reason, hysterical.
You're all right, mama, he shouted, trying to calm her.
They exchanged shout for shout for perhaps ten seconds. Let's
go to your poor father, and you're all right. That
woke up Briggs. By this time I was conscious of
(58:00):
what was going on in a vague way, but did
not yet realize that I was under my bed instead
of on it. Briggs, awakening in the midst of loud
shouts of fear and apprehension, came to the quick conclusion
that he was suffocating and that we were all trying
to bring him out. With a low moan, he grasped
(58:21):
the glass of camphor at the head of his bed,
and instead of sniffing it, he poured it over himself.
The room reeked of camphor. Uugh ah choked Briggs like
a drowning man, for he had almost succeeded in stopping
his breath under the deluge of pungent spirits. He leaped
out of bed and groped toward the open window, but
(58:43):
he came up against one that was closed. With his hand,
he beat out the glass, and I could hear it
crash and tinkle on the alleyway below. It was at
this juncture that I, in trying to get up, had
the uncanny sensation of feeling my bed above me foggy
with sleep. I now suspected, in my turn that the
(59:04):
whole up was being made in a frantic endeavor to
extricate me from what must be an unheard of and
perilous situation. Get me out of this, I bawled, Get
me out. I think I had the nightmarish belief that
I was entombed in a mine gas. Briggs floundering in
his camphor. By this time, my mother, still shouting, pursued
(59:26):
by Hermann, still shouting, was trying to open the door
to the attic in order to go up and get
my father's body out of the wreckage. The door was stuck, however,
and would not yield. Her frantic pulls on it only
added to the general banging and confusion. Roy and the
dog were now up, the one shouting questions, the other barking. Father,
(59:49):
farthest away and soundest sleeper of all, had by this
time been awakened by the battering on the attic door.
He decided that the house was on fire. Oh coming, okay,
he wailed, in a slow sleepy It took him many
minutes to regain full consciousness. My mother, still believing he
was caught under the bed, detected in his I'm coming,
(01:00:13):
the mournful resigned note of one who was preparing to
meet his maker. He's dying, she shouted, I'm all right.
Briggs yelled to reassure her. I'm all right. He still
believed that it was his own closeness to death that
was worrying mother. I found at last the light switch
in my room unlocked. The door, and Briggs and I
(01:00:33):
joined the others at the attic door. The dog, who
never did like Briggs, jumped for him, assuming that he
was the culprit in whatever was going on, and Roy
had to throw Rex and hold him. We could hear
Father crawling out of the bed upstairs. Roy pulled the
attic door open with a mighty jerk, and Father came
down the stairs, sleepy and irritable, but safe and sound.
(01:00:56):
My mother began to weep when she saw him. Rex
began to howl. What in the name of God is
going on here? Asked Father. The situation was finally put
together like a giant gigsaw puzzle. Father caught a cold
from prowling around in his bare feet, but there were
(01:01:18):
no other bad results. I'm glad, said mother, who always
looked on the bright side of things, that your grandfather
wasn't here. I've done all the damage I can do here.
(01:01:43):
Thank you for listening. Most of our Countdown music was arranged, produced,
and performed by Brian Ray and John Phillip Schanel, the
musical directors of Countdown. Produced by Tko Brothers. Mister Ray
on guitars, bass and drums. Mister Chanelle handled orchestration and keyboards.
Our satirical and fifty musical comments are by the best
baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The Olderman theme from
(01:02:06):
ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis, courtesy of ESPN, Inc.
Is our sports music. Other music arranged and performed by
the group No Horns Allowed. James Thurber's The Night the
Bed Fell was written by James Thurber. The copyright abides
and it is held by the Thurber Literary Trust. My
(01:02:27):
announcer today is my friend Tony Kornheiser, and everything else
was as always my fault. That's countdown for today, Day
two hundred of America held hostage again, just two hundred
and sixty three days until the scheduled end of Trump's
lame duck lame brained term, unless he is removed sooner
(01:02:47):
by MAGA and Jeffrey Epstein or the actuarial tables, or
wandering around the White House roof. No, don't go near
the edge. No no. The next scheduled countdown is Monday
till then. I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning, good after noon,
good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is
(01:03:27):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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